Gone Medieval - Pope Joan: Sacred Scandal

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Out of the shadowy world of the medieval church, an extraordinary legend emerged of a woman who disguised herself as a man and remarkably, rose to become Pope. It's a story of secret identities, illicit affairs and a Church shaken by the unthinkable - a female pope giving birth in the midst of a sacred procession.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Professor Craig Rustici from Hofstra University NY, author of The Afterlife of Pope Joan: Deploying the Popess Legend in Early Modern England. Together they try to unravel the threads of the scant historical evidence, the anti-papal agendas that may have fuelled the myth, and why the tale of a cross-dressing woman rising to the Throne of St. Peter continues to intrigue us more than seven centuries later.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcastEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here >You can take part in our listener survey here > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Out of the shadowy world of the medieval church, an extraordinary legend emerged that has endured for more than seven centuries. It's the story of a woman who disguised herself as a man and remarkably rose to become Pope. This episode on Pope Joan was suggested by gone medieval listener Holly in New Zealand. Hi, Eleanor. My name's Holly Brown from Duned in New Zealand. I had to pull out of my archaeology degree last year for health reasons and gone medieval really helped me

stay sane and feed my passion for medieval history while I got better. I've really loved to hear an episode in Pope Joan. I think whether or not she existed, people believed she existed for hundreds of years, and that would be really interesting to explore. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Holly. So, was there really a brilliant woman scholar whose intellect and ambition shattered the ultimate glass ceiling of Christendom? Or was it all a provocative myth created to undermine the power and authority of the all-male papacy? From the first whispers in the 13th century chronicles to the so-called proof of a papal bust, the Pope Joan Tale has captivated generations. It's a story of secret identities, illicit affairs, and a church shaken by the unthinkable. a female pope giving birth in the midst of a sacred procession.

I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga, and on this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm joined by Professor Craig Rustasy from Hofstra University, New York State. He's the author of The Afterlife of Pope Joan, deploying the popist legend in early modern England. And together, we're going to unravel the threads of the scant historical evidence and the anti-papal agendas that may have fueled the myth and why the tale of a cross-dressing woman rising to the throne of St. Peter continues to intrigue us more than seven centuries later. Craig, I think the very first thing to do is thank you so much for allowing me to drag you on here to talk about this figure of Pope Joan, which is an interesting one because it's a legend, yes?

Yes. So what is this legend? Can you give us a very kind of basic outline? Sure. I'll combine a couple of the earliest accounts. So in the 9th century or perhaps the 11th, a young woman who was in love with a student, probably a monk, cross-dressed as a man, so that she could accompany her lover in his studies. In some cases, to Athens. But in any case, eventually, she studies along with him, excels at it, ends up in Rome where her intellectual and scholarly accomplishments are recognized. She has prominent students that she is teaching. She's well respected so that when the Pope dies, there's almost unanimous support for her as the next Pope. She serves in that capacity for a little over two years, apparently doing what pop to do fairly well. However, at a certain point, she gives in to lust and sleeps with either that original lover in some versions or takes a new lover from the Curia or the Cardinals and becomes pregnant. She does not recognize the progress of her pregnancy or realize how close she might be to childbirth and somewhat recklessly joins or leads a papal procession through the streets of Rome.

During that procession, she goes into labor and delivers the child and is thus exposed as this cross-dressing fraud. A couple different outcomes depending on who's telling the story at that point. But either she dies on the spot or she is murdered. by the angry Roman mob. Usually the stories then proceed to say she's been stricken from the record of popes because of this disgrace. And they might even add that popes traumatized by this experience avoid that particular processional path through Rome and turn away from the street where the infamous birth occurred. Any word on what happens to the baby in other of these cases?

There are a couple different versions of what happens to both of them. the earliest imagines that she is dragged behind a horse and stone to death. Not really mention the baby there. Others that she dies on the spot and others she's thrown into a dungeon. There are a couple kind of redemptive ones where she repents. Her son grows up to be the bishop of Ostia. She has repented so successfully that after she dies, people venerate her as a saint and miracles are attributed to her.

And there's another strain which embanked. imagines that she's given a choice. Very late in that procession, the angel Gabriel comes to her. This is developed in a 15th century play and says, look, you can have fame and perfect reputation in this world, but you're going to suffer eternally in the next. Or you can die in disgrace here, but she'll be redeemed in the next world.

And we know what happens, right? She chooses correctly because she is disgraced. And the last one that comes to mind, there's a woodcut from around 1600 that imagines Joan in hell. And she's portrayed hanging from a gibbet with her clerical lover, looks like a cardinal next to her, and cradling her infant in her arms. So in that case,

the baby gets to spend eternity in hell with Joan menaced by demons. Oh, lovely. So this is an incredibly popular legend. So what's the very earliest version that we have? So the earliest we have is from a Dominican named, Jean de Mailee. That's from 1250. It has the bare outline. It was not, however, the most influential. One of the ways that we see this is that it is one of the versions that places her pontificate in the 11th century, around 1099. But it fell out of circulation fairly quickly. And the one that

was really influential is from a few decades later. It's from Martinas Palinas and other Dominican. He had a lot of credibility because he was a papal chaplain. We're not 100% sure if the version that's in his chronicle is original with him, or it might have been added, but it was added. It was very soon after he composed the chronicle. And that is the one that situates her papacy around 854 and introduces some of the other details. And that's the one that kind of stuck and is more frequently elaborated in later versions. So this is interesting. So basically Jean de Malle, it's like a sketch, right? He's curious of the bare bones that you've got in terms of how to make a Pope Joan story.

And this is a chronicle, right? It's the Universal Metz Chronicle. And I find that quite interesting because chronicles are not quite histories, the closest thing that you get to a history in the medieval period in that, there are people saying this happened in this year, this happened in that year. And to put it in a chronicle kind of suggests some desire for it to be read as an actual event. So do you think that is significant at all?

Why are we seeing Jean go off like this for some reason? It's interesting because he's cautious about it too, right? It begins with what you might translate out of the Latin as to be verified. So he's framing it cautiously in that way. Now, there's some theories about why Dominicans would have been interested in this. 13th century, the papacy was cracking down on the mendicant or a bad. begging orders. The Dominicans and Franciscans mostly avoided the brunt of that, but there were efforts to question whether these orders should be preaching or hearing confessions on their own.

It was the effort to herd them back into the sort of diocesan structure or the regular structure of the church. And the three 13th century stories, two are from Dominicans, one's from a Franciscan, these are all orders that were potentially on the wrong end of that crackdown. So one possibility, is that members of those orders might have been motivated to poke the Pope or the papacy in the eye, right? Yeah, yeah. Give them some grief. I find the begging orders really interesting because they arise out of this criticism of the church. The church has strayed from its roots.

And they say, oh, okay, we're Dominicans and we're Franciscans. And we're dedicated to apostolic poverty. And we're going to be people that the public can interact with who are visibly poor. And the papacy is, we love this. This is great because we can keep being rich over here. But if we just go shove a friar out, in front of everyone, then that's great. And then everyone can agree that we're all being very holy indeed.

But it doesn't even take about 100 years for them to then get a bunch of money. And then the papacy is not happy with the fact that they have acquired as much power and money that they have had and parish priests hate it because they feel like money that's given to Franciscans or Dominicans ought to be coming into their own pockets. So they complain to the papacy. But then unfortunately, Dominicans and Franciscans are rather clever. A lot of them go to university. And because they are these preaching orders and they're embedded in cities, they know how to strike the public imagination, which is very interesting.

And I think on display here because here you have this learned thing saying, oh, this is to be verified. Oh, I don't know. It's just a bit of a rumor. But you drop it in almost as a template or something that people can pick up and run with. And I think that it says a lot about the understanding of how it is people work and how. even like the literate gossip mills, let alone the illiterate ones, can take these stories and run with them. Definitely. And in fact, the third 13th century version of this is Dominican. And that's really in a preaching manual. It's not in a chronicle. So it's there as a sort of exemplary story. And then

presumably especially addressed to that lay public that you were just talking about. I suppose here, I do also want to just take a moment to talk about dates. Because placing this story in the 11th century is quite interesting because the 11th century is also this point in time when the papacy makes a really big play for more legal authority for saying, for example, this is the time of the Gregorian reforms where they're saying clergy can't get married, when they're saying that they are the ones who invest bishops, things like this. So to me, saying this goes on in the 11th century is very specifically calling into question these ideas of papal authority. Would you agree with that? I think so. And in fact, there are a number of theories about where the legend might have come from.

And one of those is that it grows out of a dispute between Leo the 11th and the patriarch of Constantinople. In that dispute, we have correspondence from Leo disagreeing with the practice in the Eastern Church ordaining Unix. And he culminates his complaint. And you can see what you get for that, right? You end up with a female patriarch of Constantinople. And the theory where the supposition is we don't have this document, but that the Eastern Church might have done that child like, I know what you are, but what am I? And I'm going to throw it right back at them. You had a female pope, right?

So that locates it maybe in the strains between the two branches of Christianity, the Eastern and Western at that point in time. But that would send to reinforce your point about strains in the assertion of papal authority in the 11th century. One way or another, I suppose, is certainly a kind of anti-Papal story. But it's very interesting because when people ask me about it now, everybody wants to talk about it because they like the idea of a woman being a Pope. But this is expressly supposed to be like, and that's bad, because women are bad, right? There is, for us, we're at such a move and we're so desperate to see women in history, which we don't always get to hear from, that people really almost want there to have been a Pope Joan, not for the, oh, and this shows the papacy up to be foolish side of things. But for us, we're like, oh, and isn't that nice? Isn't it nice that a woman could be both?

You can see that in the kind of extraordinary popularity of retellings of this story. So there have been three films, one in 1972, one in 2009. One, I just discovered in prepping for our conversation, French film in 2016. There's a German language musical on stage now. There are a couple other musicals in the past 20 years that have been attempted. So you're right, people love the story. And at this point in time, I don't think they necessarily love the story because it's great anti-Catholic propaganda or because they're a misogynist. I think some of them are claiming Joan as a sort of proto-feminist heroine who can at least demonstrate what women are capable of doing, that they have the intellect to excel.

I suppose one way or another, this still remains an incredibly popular story, especially in the Middle Ages. So we have our initial iterations, which are coming to us from the Dominicans and Franciscans. But then in the 14th century, some of my favorite guys, the humanists get a hold of this, right? So Baccio, in particular, gets his hands into this, right? Would you say that there's a reason why a guy like Bacchato, he writes humorous stories, and this is a humorous story. So it seems to be a match made in heaven, right? I'm actually struck with Bacchato by the sort of the ambivalence about her.

because in the course of his narrative, he talks about certain points in her life when she's remarkably virtuous and saintly. So in his version of the story, for example, I believe that original lover dies. And she has this period of virtuous celopacy. He talks about the virtue of her private life at that point in time. Like everybody else, he recognized the intellect. But then he seems highly invested in the intellect being overwhelmed by the body. And she gets this irrepressible, sexual desire, and he luxuriates in talking about that. He's talked about how she's mounted to the throne of the fisherman of St. Peter, and then this lover that she takes mounts her, and he's completely scandalized by that. But it almost seems he likes the fact that it fits

neatly into a sort of rise and fall narrative. He can draw parallels. The second portrait in his book of famous women is of the legendary Assyrian queen Simuramus, and it follows a very similar pattern in that she accomplishes great things when she cross-dresses, and then she gives into even worse lust into an ancestral relationship with her son at the end. So she scales the heights and then is undone by her body and falls from those heights. I suppose in many ways this is a classical story about women. Because one of the big ways that we talk about women or women are gendered at the time in the Middle Ages is no one is saying that they aren't necessarily totally incapable of intellectual feats, but it is very much understood that they are undone

by the luxuriousness of their bodies, right? And even if you're incredibly clever, a lot of the time, you're just going to be undone because you saw a hot boy. And then that's it. There's something that you can do. So it really fits very neatly into the understood trajectory of what women's lives should be legendary or not. She comes up a lot too for me in my research because she is brought up by one of my favorite people of all time, my good friend Jan Hussein, legendary Czech reformer and the leader of the Hussite movement in Bohemia.

He, very unfortunately for him, gets hauled before the council of Constance in 1415. And the papacy is saying, Jan, now is the time to renounce all of your claims that the papacy needs to be completely reformed and stop trying to translate the Bible into check, please. And Jan says, no, I'm absolutely not going to do that. I am really going to gun for getting killed right now.

And also, by the way, the papacy is quite evil. And Pope Joan is one of the people that he brings up in order to prove his point about the profligacy of the papacy in general. Yes, he seems to almost be the kind of culmination. There's a three-step process in the 14th century. and then extending into Huss in the early 15th century. And it's interesting kind of how these dissenters use the Pope Astoria. So William Mimakam might be the earliest in that century.

And he wants to establish that there are such things as pseudo-popes. People who have been taken for Pope, who've held the office, but were illegitimate and should be disregarded. He's got about 20 of them. And front and center is Pope Joan. For him, Joan demonstrates that not all Pope's illegitimate, And then John Wickliff amps things up a little bit and imagines that the Cardinals have elected Joan when she is pregnant. And so for Wycliffe, it discredits the whole College of Cardinals, right?

If they could be this grotesquely deceived about a woman becoming Pope, then just imagine how many other things they could get wrong. So let's just forget about their authority. And then Hus seems to finish it basically by saying that what Joan demonstrates most of all is that the Pope is unnecessary. You've had this pseudo-poop for you, say, two and a half years, and things went the way they always go. So if we don't need a real pope for two and a half years, maybe we don't need one for a lot longer. And that seems to be us's move. Which is quite an interesting thing because he brings this up. And so does John Wycliffe.

So does William of Ockham. But they bring this up and they're like, yeah, and that's true. Pope Joan, everybody remembers Pope Joan. So by this point, we're accepting that this is true. Yes, I think that's what's really useful about those episodes, because you would think if anybody disputed this story, then they would be saying no. But if they're disputing it, they're disputing the significance of it, the import of it. They're not saying it didn't happen. And there's an even particularly striking example of that acceptance. So we have records that if you've ever had the fortune to visit Tiena and to go into the Duomo, the top of it is decorated by these busts of with their names underneath them. So we have records that in 1600, there was an order to remove Pope Jones bust. Seems as though for at least 100 years in the cathedral in Sienna, you could look up and see someone with that label. They're not meant to be actual representations. The same

faces cycle through. You might have three or four different faces. We have records of the order. Get rid of that. So somebody believed it enough that they were willing to put it up there. I find that quite interesting as well because not only are they willing to put it up there, but they're saying, yeah, and she can hang out. That's fine. She's a Pope, right? So that, to me, is quite interesting because I think there is a tendency to say, and this is just a story to discredit the papacy. But some people are like, no, that's fine.

Joan can stay. Everybody, let's get a bust of her and put it up. Yes. This is interesting because there is this ability to either use this as a tool or a cudgel to beat the church with, Or it's just a nice little story that you get to tell. How is it any different from Robin Hood or something like that? When do we start questioning this, right? Because say, we're somewhere in the 15th century.

We're hanging out with my good friend Jan Hus and everyone is agreeing that Pope Joan happened and also this means that we don't have to have the papacy anymore. When do people start saying, come on, guys, that was a myth. That's not real. I think with the threat of reformation. So dissenters are okay. But when you have different churches in the 16th century, then the tolerance, disappears. So our first effort to really rebut the story is in 1562. It's Anafrio Pondino.

And actually, he's credited with doing most of the important work that other challenges to the story would draw upon in the future. He gets the greatest hits of why Joan could not be Joan. Why Joan could not have been the Popes. And then for almost a century, it valleys back and forth between Catholics and Protestants, each trying to make their case. Interestingly, I think perhaps the most famous person to ever do a really big dismantling of it was actually a Calvinist, right? A Protestant. This is end of the 16th century and that's David Blondell, right? Yes. So around 1647, some Protestants accused him of taking a bribe to do it because it was so much crossing the lines and going over to the other side. But it appears that Blondell just didn't like arguments being made in the way that they were.

that the evidence for Joan was flimsy and insubstantial. And if you were going to build your argument here in those ways, then you were potentially setting the stage to build other arguments about other things that might be consequential to him in the same way. So I really just didn't want to see an argument carried on this sort of flimsy evidence. He's a real historian's historian, is Blondell.

And we all love him for this because this is one of, the first real examples, I think, of a critique of history in the way that we do it now, attempting to go back and find the sources, trace things back to their roots, say this is what history means. It's not just an uncritical acceptance of every single thing that you've read because things contradict each other. So for us, we're like, yes, do some historiography, John. Please, let's take this up. So David Blondell is this almost legendary character for his desire to do this because I think it gives us all meaning. But having said that, it's not like there isn't pushback to this. As you say, he's described as taking bribes. I think it's Pierre Bale says about

this, that the Protestant interest requires the story of Joan to be true. It's such a perfect, a little piece of historiographical argument, which is saying, yeah, you've got a vested interest in doing this. You're saying that this is true because it serves your interests. And so I find this to be such an interesting part of the story just because, it shows how, I suppose, the craft of history starts being made. And that is true of this period, right? I think a bit earlier, but one of the great examples of critical historical examination was debunking the donation of Constantine.

And again, you had people getting their fingernails dirty, looking at the documents and being able to establish what's a forgery and what's a genuine original text. And again, it's, you know, the Reformation makes this stuff important. Yeah, absolutely. because it's one thing to have internecine beefs between Franciscans and the papacy, given one thing or another. And it's quite another to be calling into question the entire reason for the church existing at all, especially from an outside interest, right? And its claim of superiority over Protestantism, right? Part of the argument is who's the original church?

And part of the status of Catholicism was to claim we've got this consistent apostolic succession from Peter on. And this enables you to say, no, it's an unbroken succession. And what exactly happened? So presumably in two years, Joan ordained bishops and those bishops ordained priests and those priests administered the sacraments. How do you explain that? You don't have the unbroken apostolic succession. There's a 17th century polemicist who uses Joan and has this wonderful litter phrase where he says,

what happened did the church hop headless for two and a half years while Joan was there? I suppose this is as good a time as I'd need to bring up the holes in the evidence. Obviously, you and I have to start off with, this is a legend, it's not real. But we've got the dates. Like, this is the problem with the Pope's story in general is because, okay, if we say that she's the Pope in the 9th century, it's like we know everyone from that time period on. You've got Leo the 4th. Then you've got Benedict the 3rd.

These are pretty established guys who we know a lot about. This isn't like saying, oh, I don't know. It was about 525. When maybe you could get away with it in the really early medieval period when we don't have great records. But post-S Charlemagne, the church is really keeping good records on what's going on. So that just doesn't make any sense. There are multiple problems. We don't have the necessary gap.

We don't have those two years to fill in. You've got an enormous time lag between when these things are supposed to have happened and when we have the first records. So again, from the 9th century to the. 13th century, even if it's an 11th century story, as Jean has it. That's still a couple decades. So you get on the Protestant side in the early modern period these claims of what would be an incredibly successful cover-up, right? Protestant Plymists will say, the Catholics have gelled all the books, right? They cut her out of all these stories, but it's very improbable. And there are efforts to claim earlier sources. But again, when we talk about people like Blondell and

Ponvinio doing the work, what happens when you look at those texts, you find it's not the earliest manuscript. And when you examine those manuscripts, you find that they're in a different scribal hand or they're in the margins. So all the efforts to find an earlier source turn out to be interpolations that historians are able to debunk. And this is one of those things too. I'm sorry, if you have a pope who was a woman and then she gave birth, why? While on a papal parade in full sight of everyone, I don't care how powerful you think the church is and what a boogeyman you think there are. Someone will have written this down successfully from that point in time. There is absolutely no way to burn every single mention of this because it would be the hottest news that anyone had ever heard.

It would get out of Italy immediately. It would be everywhere. There would be rival papal factions, depending on who wants to get on top that would say, this is your fault. No, this is your fault. politics and gossip are still incredibly huge things in the medieval period and you would not be able to cover something like this up. You just wouldn't. There is a part of us though, I think, especially from a modern point of view that wants this to be true, right? And I think this is partially desire to see more women in history and positions of power. Because when you look at the medieval period, there are lots of powerful women, but they're not women behaving like men, right? I think there's a real desire to say, oh, and women can do anything that men can do. And so they could be the hope very easily, all it takes is intelligence and inability to get along in religious circles and women can do that. Whereas medieval people aren't saying that that isn't true, but they're saying women will eventually be undone by their overwhelming sexuality, which I think is something

that modern audiences just don't understand. That's not a way that we would understand women to be. But then there is also, I think, a part of the reason this does also survive is still anti-Catholic sentiment. Do you agree with that? I think. I think that there's still this kind of Protestant desire for the story to be true, just kind of thumb your nose at the papacy, as it were. I think that's certainly the case. And if you think about some of the elements of this, they do speak to stress points or conflicts or vulnerabilities. It's very much a story about, as we were saying, unbridled and uncontained sexual desire. If we look at the sorts of problems that the Catholic Church and other churches, but most

infamously the Catholic Church has confronted recently. It's how are the clerics managing their desire? As early as the 17th century, it was used as a way of demonstrating, look, this notion that lifelong celibacy is possible is just false. And when you try to impose that, then what follows is not chastity, but a kind of redirected and destructively directed sexual desire. The Protestants were very happy to quote Paul, better to marry than to birth. and the 17th century play in England that takes this up really does develop that. We have this sort of Pope John character beginning as a celibate nun and that's just not working. And that leads to all the other problems.

Yeah, I suppose that, again, is linking it back to the earlier stories that place this as an 11th century story, right? Because that's right when the clerical celibacy demand comes in. So if we're saying, oh, yeah, clerical celibacy is not workable, then you're going to want to pin this on Gregory the Great, right? That's the thing that you do in order to make it make sense. I feel bad that when I do talk to people about this because they want it to be true and then I have to be the fun place. Because it's such a good story. On top of everything else, the way that it plays a role in propaganda, the way that it

makes political statements for varying people, that is all one thing. But it is just a barnstormer of a story. It is, definitely. One of the things that I've looked at, but another thing happens in the 13th century that may feel better to us in some ways is there's a real, in many, ways a manifest demand of women to have a greater role in spiritual and religious life. And I speculate a little bit that this might be part of where the story comes from as well. A number of the male monastic orders just felt overwhelmed by the number of convents who were repealing to them for

affiliation. Eventually set a stop to hit in the pause button. We're not taking any more of you. And I think that strain then led to an examination of what was happening in those convents. And in some cases, they didn't like what they found. Right? They found. found that abbesses were preaching to the nuns under their supervision, were hearing confessions, and the church had to come and say, no, I mean, can't do that. And then almost maybe as a further reaction to that, you have what was a kind of lay movement for intentional spiritual communities of women, the Beguines. That flourished for a time until late 13th century. They were forbidden as well. And then if you like, as far as good stories, this one is too late to be a source.

for Joan, but I think it suggests that they're swimming in the same soup. There's the Gulliamite heresy, which happens around Milan, uncovered in 1300, prosecuted in 1300. But it's a name for a woman Goliama, who was imagined as another sort of Christ figure, so that after her death, a sort of alternative church headed by a woman named Manfreda was established, and she was naming female cardinals to be part of this church. So it just seems like in the 13th century, when this story was arising, it was a lot of pressure from women to play more of a role in religious life. So I suppose we're not alone here, this modern desire to see women in places of power, especially religious ones. That's something that connects us to medieval people. Yeah, I suppose in these circumstances,

you can completely understand why this is a relatable story or an attractive story. If we're at this point in time where there is some stresses being fomented between the genders, you know, greater demands for women's involvement in religion, then, of course, it makes sense that it's going to come out in these sorts of ways. Yes, I think some of us want it and some of us fear it, right? So another kind of interesting detail when the Catholic started fighting back in the 16th century, French Catholic Plymises, Flormunda Raymonder, answered by saying, look, if you want to find a Popess, look across the channel, look at Queen Elizabeth I first, the church of

England is governed, led by a woman. There's your Popess. You don't have to look any farther than that. And in fact, Elizabeth was careful about this, right? Her brother and father took the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England. She took the title Supreme Governor. She avoided that body politic metaphor. And right before her, a track that was attacking Mary Tudor used, has the title, the monstrous regiment of women. And you can see how the body politic metaphor lends it. to thinking that it's a monstrosity if you have a woman as they had. And so Elizabeth was smart enough to avoid that implicit metaphor. I suppose also what we can say is this is not exactly a completely medieval or early modern concern either. There is plenty of ongoing debate about the

place of women in religious offices. And it's not as though women can hold high religious office in the Catholic Church even now. And indeed, in many Protestant orders, there's plenty of pushback to women holding places such as this. As we're recording today, the news in the U.S. is that the largest Protestant denomination, the U.S. Southern Baptists, are voting on whether to forbid women from being pastors. Yes, not just Catholic, not just medieval. It's an anxiety that is with us today.

Which I suppose just proves why the story is so enduring. It can do anything. I think we're going to have to leave it there because otherwise I could talk or ear off about this for another hour. Craig, thank you so very much for coming on to speak to us today. Thank you for remind me. It's great fun. Thank you so much to all of you for listening. Once again to Holly for suggesting the episode and to Craig for joining me. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. And if you liked what you've heard, please don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us

an email at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com. I'll be back again next Tuesday for another episode. and my co-host Matt Lewis will retake the Gaum medieval throne on Friday. Until next time.